


Luncheonette Girl

by TheGlassFloor



Category: Roseanne, The Conners (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:07:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29385330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGlassFloor/pseuds/TheGlassFloor
Summary: Darlene becomes an internet meme.
Comments: 2





	Luncheonette Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Just a funny idea that popped into my head one day. So I ran with it.

Darlene exhaled, allowing herself to relax in the living room armchair. It was a relief to not have to be on her feet for a little while. She was mindlessly scrolling through her social media feed on her phone while Becky lolled on the sofa nearby, switching through the TV channels with the remote.

The front door opened, and Darlene’s two children, Harris and Mark, stepped inside the house, having just returned home from school. Harris slammed the door behind her, startling Darlene out of her reverie.

“You are such a doofus,” the teenage girl said to her mother before retreating upstairs. Clearly she was upset about something.

Darlene frowned. “Oh, great, what did I do now?”

“She’s embarrassed about something that happened at school today,” Mark said, taking off his backpack and setting it by the foot of the stairs.

“Uh-oh. What happened? Did she cut the cheese while giving a speech in front of the whole class?” Darlene sent a mischievous smirk in her sister’s direction.

Becky scowled. “Shut up, Darlene.”

Mark let out a small giggle and shook his head. “No. Some kids were making fun of her, though.”

“For what? And why’d she take it out on me?”

“I’ll show you. Mind if I see your phone a sec?”

Darlene handed it to him, and he brought up the YouTube app and typed in a few words. He tapped the result that came up, then he turned the phone around so the screen faced her. Becky got up off the sofa and came over to have a closer look at the video that was playing.

It looked like an old TV commercial, with some fuzzy VHS distortion. An annoying jingle set to lounge music played over scenes of actors smiling too widely as they pretended to shop inside a department store.

An offscreen announcer’s voice broke in: “She’ll love the fashions. He’ll love the hardware. You’ll both love our new lower prices. And everyone loves our snack shop. Especially the kiddies!”

Suddenly the memories came flooding back. The next shot to appear on the screen hit Darlene like a sledgehammer to the face.

It was a child’s hand, reaching into a basket of french fries. The camera panned out slightly, and then there she was: fourteen-year-old Darlene Conner, wearing a floral print dress, her hair in braided pigtails, munching a fry and tilting her head adorably while facing the camera with a beaming smile.

“Oh my God,” the adult Darlene uttered in a small, weak, defeated voice.

Becky felt like her sides were about to split open. “Man! I’m glad I ain’t her daughter!”

She walked out of the room and into the kitchen, laughing all the way, leaving Darlene alone with her son in the living room.

“How did that get on the internet?!!” Darlene wanted greatly to know. That commercial originally aired decades ago, back when her mom was working at Rodbell's Luncheonette; Roseanne signed up the whole Conner family to appear in it. So much time had passed that Darlene had practically forgotten about it, and would have assumed everyone else had as well.

“Somebody must have had it on an old tape that was laying around all this time,” Mark said, handing her phone back to her.

“Great. Some loser had nothing better to do than tape commercials off of TV back in the nineties, and now I have to live with that embarrassment again.”

“Some people make a whole hobby out of scouring through old VHS cassettes with shows taped off of TV in the eighties and nineties,” Mark said. “They only upload the commercials. There are entire YouTube channels devoted to this kind of thing.” Mark reached for his mother’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Don’t worry, Mom. Just give it time. Pretty soon people will move on and pay attention to something else, just like they always do.”

“Wait a second,” Darlene said. “Entire YouTube channels?”

“Uh-huh. Hours of the stuff. It’s a nostalgia thing, I guess.”

“ _Hours_ ?” Darlene said disbelievingly. “Where are they getting that much content? And who has that much time on their hands? Do these people not have _jobs_?”

“I think for some of them, it _is_ their job. They probably go to thrift stores and places like that to buy used tapes. The more old commercials they find and upload, the more hits they get on their channel.”

Darlene looked at her phone again, this time paying attention to the stats listed under the video. Her eyes grew wide.

No. That couldn’t be right. The video had been posted less than a week ago. There was _no way_ it already had that many views.

If nothing else, at least this bizarre turn of events was taking her mind off the aching in her feet from all the time she spent standing at work.

And just like that, a lightbulb went on in her head…

* * *

Darlene’s sudden acceptance, nay, _embracing_ of her sudden virality was enough to render everyone around her bewildered, until they realized just how brilliant her plan was. She’d always been a creative person, and if anyone was going to capitalize off of her sudden internet fame, it would be her, not some stranger (though she did have that stranger to thank for opening the door, so to speak, whoever they were).

She didn’t understand just what it was about the commercial that had everyone suddenly watching it and sharing it, and she probably never would. People on the internet just had a tendency to pay attention to the most bizarre and unusual things, it seemed, and there was no way to predict what would go viral next. Even if you tried, you’d inevitably be wrong. All you could really do was latch onto something that was already inexplicably popular, and strike while the iron was hot.

And that’s what she did. Darlene started a YouTube channel of her own, which she used to livestream videos of herself, an adult woman, in pigtails and a floral print dress, eating various foods and smiling for the camera.

Did she feel ridiculous doing it? Yes. Did she garner a ton of subscribers from doing it? Also yes.

She didn’t have the right to use the Rodbell’s name, of course, and to avoid any potential legal trouble, she didn’t use the image of herself from the commercial either, but rather created a new composite image using an old family photo of herself as a little girl, photoshopping her cheesy grinning face onto a generic image of a girl in a gingham dress, with a basket of fries superimposed in front, and used it as her avatar.

She named her channel “Heidi the Luncheonette Girl”.

* * *

“Becky, are those onion rings almost ready?” Darlene said, giving one of her pigtail braids a final twist and clamping the pink bow over it tightly. “I’m live in two minutes.”

She was sitting at the kitchen table with the camera mounted on a tripod and pointed straight at her. She checked her makeup in the mirror one more time. The amount of blush on her cheeks was absurd, but Becky had assured her that the rosier her cheeks looked, the more childlike she would seem.

“Onion rings, coming right up,” Becky said while standing at the kitchen counter. She extracted the metal basket from the air fryer and dumped its contents--hot and crispy onion rings--onto a plate and set it down in front of her sister.

Darlene didn’t understand why anyone in their right mind would want to watch a grown woman dress as a child and eat fried foods. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to understand why, either. But, here they were. Three weeks and counting, her subscribers just kept going up.

Who knew? Maybe people just got a kick out of it because they thought it was funny. It wasn’t so different from the kind of things lots of comedians had done in the past.

Maybe she agreed with them. Maybe it was a little funny.

Aunt Jackie was sitting at the other end of the table with the laptop open in front of her, going through product orders on Darlene’s online store.

“Girls, this is amazing,” Jackie said. “We just keep getting new orders for Luncheonette Girl t-shirts, coffee mugs, phone cases...I don’t know if we can keep up with the demand!”

_It won’t last,_ Darlene kept telling herself. And it didn’t need to. She never intended to make an entire career out of this. The burst of additional income was certainly appreciated, though.

Maybe someday she would fulfill her dreams of being a respected writer. For now, she would have to settle for being an embarrassment to her daughter and a laughing stock among her friends and colleagues, past and present...everyone she’d ever known, basically.

People could think what they wanted. She had bills to pay and kids to feed.

Harris would forgive her, as soon as she spent some of the money she was making on something big and expensive that her daughter wanted. Darlene remembered all too well how badly she wanted that three hundred dollar CD-player when she was Harris’ age.

Becky checked the time. “Ready, Darlene?”

“Ready.”

“You’re on in five, four, three…”


End file.
